Content warning: mentions of loss and grief

Author Colleen Hoover’s latest adaptation, Regretting You, hits cinemas on Friday 24^th October, and with the controversy that surrounded her previous film It Ends With Us, it was hit-or-miss as to whether the new flick starring Mason Thames (How to Train Your Dragon)and Mckenna Grace (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) would be received well.

Directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) and produced in part by Anna Todd, author of the novels that influenced the After series, there was a preconception on how this story would be brought to screen. The end product ­– exactly as expected.

The film follows mother and daughter Morgan (Allison Williams) and Clara Grant (Mckenna Grace) as they navigate love and loss after Morgan’s husband Chris (Scott Eastwood) and sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) die in a tragic car accident. Upon finding out the two had lied to Morgan about their whereabouts and it is assumed the two are having an affair, Morgan attempts to protect Clara from her father’s infidelity for it to only blow up in her face.

Dave Franco joins the core cast as the grumpy uncle whose natural instinct after his wife passes is to turn his romantic intentions on a mourning Morgan. Clara, similarly, deals with her grief in typical teenage fashion by dating the coolest guy at school ­– Miller Adams (Mason Thames). While it is beautiful to see love blossom from anger, it feels as though there is such a quick disregard for the dead in the name of true love, as the ‘it should have been us’ discourse begins between Morgan and Jonah (Dave Franco) before the word ‘affair’ is spoken.

In a character-driven story, it is no wonder that the biggest pull of the film is the actors’ chemistry. Grace and Thames are electric on screen together and give the best they can to an epic teen love story. It was actually the rise and fall of Clara and Miller’s relationship that brought me closer to tears than any of the grief-fuelled story.

Speaking of tears, I had prepared so thoroughly for a film I believed to be gut-wrenching that I filled my pockets with tissues on the way to the cinema. It was only the epilogue that gave me the lump in my throat; the film is full of sad moments that are undercut with attempted comedy or deserve to be lingered on before moving to another romantic plot point.

Where character shines, the plot falls short to continuity errors. Morgan regularly comments on the past 17 years of her life being dedicated to her sister, however we find out post-halfway that Clara is due to celebrate her 17^th birthday. The confusion arises when Morgan makes the claim that she practically raised Jenny herself, so the question of why the last 17 years are the most notable in older sister parenting seemed to get lost in translation.

Similarly, Miller’s quirk for always having a lollipop in his mouth leaves itself to no explanation. Having not read the book, I wonder if that was a tidbit that was shoehorned into the movie to please the fans.

As the credits rolled, I found there was a lot to be desired. From the need to cry to the want to know more about Chris and Jenny’s affair, I feel like Regretting You could have been another victim of a poor adaptation. However, it is also absolutely a product of its own genre; as it such, it lends itself heavily to a solid, heartfelt teenage romance.

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